Nadia Lockyer resigns as Alameda County supervisor

Abrupt resignation after months of turmoil takes staff by surprise

Published 4:00 am, Saturday, April 21, 2012

Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle

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Alameda County Supervisor Nadia Lockyer walks to a conference room with her chief of staff Ruben Briones to attend a special meeting of the board of supervisors in Oakland, Calif. on Tuesday, March 20, 2012. It was Lockyer's first meeting since she entered a substance abuse treatment program following an incident with an ex-boyfriend. less

Alameda County Supervisor Nadia Lockyer walks to a conference room with her chief of staff Ruben Briones to attend a special meeting of the board of supervisors in Oakland, Calif. on Tuesday, March 20, 2012. It ... more

Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle

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Alameda County Supervisors Scott Haggerty, left, and Nate Miley sit next to Nadia Lockyer's empty seat during their scheduled meeting in Oakland Tuesday March 13, 2012.

Alameda County Supervisors Scott Haggerty, left, and Nate Miley sit next to Nadia Lockyer's empty seat during their scheduled meeting in Oakland Tuesday March 13, 2012.

Photo: Lance Iversen, The Chronicle

Nadia Lockyer resigns as Alameda County supervisor

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Battling addiction and the humiliation of a highly publicized altercation in a Newark hotel room with a former lover she met in a rehab program, Alameda County Supervisor Nadia Lockyer abruptly resigned Friday.

Despite Lockyer's tumultuous last few months and increasingly bizarre behavior, her announcement Friday surprised even her chief of staff, who learned about the resignation from news reports as he worked in her office at the Alameda County administration building.

Lockyer, the wife of state Treasurer Bill Lockyer, was a political unknown in the Bay Area before her influential husband funded most of the record $1.6 million spent on her 2010 supervisorial campaign.

Lockyer's resignation is the latest chapter in a lurid and murky tale involving the high-profile political couple from Hayward and allegations of sex tapes, blackmail, drug use and violence. It started with a Feb. 3 incident in a Newark hotel room in which she called police saying her former boyfriend, Stephen Chikhani, assaulted her. She checked into an inpatient rehab center shortly afterward.

Chikhani remains under investigation by the state attorney general's office in connection with the alleged assault.

In her resignation letter Friday addressed to "constituents, colleagues and friends," Nadia Lockyer, 40, said she could be a "great mom" and a good supervisor but not while dealing with "early recovery from addiction and the aftermath of interpersonal violence."

"In AA and NA, days of sobriety are counted," Lockyer wrote. "In motherhood, the number of days with a healthy level of stress and tears should be too. While I can boast 77 days of sobriety to this day, I can barely count to ten in the latter category. For this, I owe my family, constituents, staff and colleagues a huge apology."

Bill Lockyer, 70, is one of California's leading Democrats. He was elected to the state Legislature in 1973 and later served as state attorney general. He is exploring a run for the state controller's office in 2014 when he is termed out of the treasurer's job.

"I fully support Nadia's decision to step down as county supervisor and focus on completing her recovery and caring for our son," Bill Lockyer said Friday in a statement.

Nadia Lockyer did not mention her husband in her resignation letter, saying she was leaving office in part to "focus on the well-being of my child" and her recovery.

News to her staff

Her chief of staff, Ruben Briones, was listed as the contact person on her resignation letter, which was circulating on Internet news sites, but when The Chronicle asked Briones for comment, he could not confirm the letter's authenticity and had to make a few calls to see if his boss had indeed resigned.

County officials and her colleagues on the Board of Supervisors also were caught off guard by Lockyer's resignation. Board President Nate Miley said he asked Lockyer on Tuesday to resign. She replied that she'd consider it over the next week.

"I told her the status quo is unacceptable," Miley said. "There has been a lot of drama and a lot of distractions, and she needs to focus on her personal life. She was doing a disservice to her constituents, her staff and her family."

The supervisors meet Tuesday and have 60 days to appoint a replacement.

Lockyer's brief political career has been pockmarked with controversy. She ran for supervisor in a bitter race against former state Sen. Liz Figueroa, who had casually dated Bill Lockyer a decade earlier, before Nadia and Bill Lockyer were married. Nadia Lockyer told The Chronicle during the race that, "whenever I went anywhere, there were a lot of negative things she would say about me," she said.

"I have no idea what she's talking about," Figueroa told The Chronicle's Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross. "Anyone who knows me knows that's just not me."

During that race, campaign materials were circulated in which Nadia Lockyer falsely stated that she was a prosecutor. She worked as the executive director of the Alameda County Family Justice Center, a one-stop center for victims of domestic violence and sexual abuse.

The root of Lockyer's recent trouble, however, stems from the encounter with Chikhani, a man she met in 2010 while both were in treatment, she for alcohol dependency and he for chemical dependency.

The Chronicle reported in February that Bill Lockyer was sent a sex tape of his wife with Chikhani some weeks before the hotel incident. He concluded he was being blackmailed to allow their relationship to continue and went to Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O'Malley, a friend, to try to get a stay-away order imposed.

'Place called addiction'

Nadia Lockyer went back to rehab again after that incident. But after a month, she returned to work.

"I got myself in a place called addiction all by myself," Nadia Lockyer wrote in her resignation letter Friday. "A decade of nonstop trauma, pain and loss are my personal excuse. But this time, this recent trauma is just too much and something I can't ignore."

No one answered at the Lockyers' Hayward hills home Friday afternoon. But Leona Fryer, a longtime Hayward hills resident who is a neighbor of the Lockyers and who voted for Nadia Lockyer and contributed to her campaign said: "She resigned. That's what we wanted."

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